New
by Aileene
Summary: RobxRae. Not as good as my first, but gypsy wouldn't leave me alone until I posted it. Raven has a few new emotions, and they want to be acknowledge. Change is coming, is she ready?


Disclaimer: Do not now, nor ever have I owned the Teen Titans or any of the characters mentioned in this story. You can try to sue me, but my cardboard box isn't all that big.

Night fell, as it always does, ushering in the darkness that people have feared since the dawn of time. It was once said that we don't fear the dark, we fear what is hiding in the darkness. Perhaps that is true for some, but the dark itself is an entity that can smother you or embrace. It can calm your fears or send you screaming for the comfort of your bed and the warm embrace of your loved one.

She was one with the dark, it never sent her screaming or shivering for a loved one. It was her lover and her confidante. Comfort and pain, in the dark she was alone, always alone.

In the light of day her friends surrounded her with their noise and love, almost smothering her in their need to express it. She tried, she really did, it was why she read outside her room or drank her tea surrounded by them. But she was only truly at home in the dark and the silence that was her curse and her blessing.

She glided towards the kitchen, thinking to make some valerian tea to settle her to sleep, but that wasn't what she wanted. Her nerves were on edge, yes. She wanted to know why, not fall into a dreamless slumber that would leave her in the same state tomorrow. She had arrived at the picture windows that overlooked their tiny island and the bay below. She looked out sightlessly as her mind churned and her nerves hummed.

"Something is coming." She whispered to herself, but she couldn't tell if it was just another brief summer storm or a cataclysmic event. 'Hell' she smirked; she didn't even know if it was something that would matter only to her or whether it was something that would create havoc in the world at large.

'It would be….pointless.' She smirked at the word she used too often, before she finished the thought. 'It would be pointless to worry about any of them until she had a better idea of what was to be faced.'

Of course HE had to enter the room at that moment, as if written into a script and blocked onto a stage he walked to stand beside her. The position was so familiar, side by side, neither one in front, neither behind. It was very similar to their friendship, they edged forward together slowly and sometimes took a few steps back from each other when they came too close.

She didn't turn to look at him; she already knew what he wanted. He would want to know the answers to the questions that were burning in the air.

Why was she up? Why was she staring out the window at nothing? Why was she avoiding him?

Those were only a few of the questions swirling in his mind, he tried to line them up so he could ask them in a linear manner, but he just wasn't sure of where to start. This was unlike him. Robin always had a plan, an expectation of how he would go about something. For some reason with her, tonight, it just wouldn't congeal. So he stood there listening to her breathe and staring out at nothing.

"I can't sleep." She said simply her voice monotone. She stood there in the moonlight, her dark robe was belted around her waist; covering her almost as well as her cloak would have, the only drawback was that she couldn't cover her face, but the shadows of the night covered her well enough she supposed.

"Obviously" He gave her that smirk that was his trademark, she felt her heart flutter and her nerves fray a bit more.

She now knew the answers to the questions she had posed to herself not that long ago. Raven was anything but stupid, now that he was standing next to her and they were alone, it seemed as if all the pieces suddenly fit together in a way she could never have imagined. She had known love like this second hand, as only an empath can. Now what? The most overused emotion, if you didn't count guilt, in the human lexicon was now perched at her door and she had no idea what to do with it. Did she allow it entry or did she cut it off and shut the door?

She smirked, just a wry twist of her lips, 'Maybe I should smack it around, much the same way it is doing to me' but she knew that was no solution.

"Why can't you sleep, what is bothering you?" Robin finally asked, looking at her, knowing she was unaware that her eyes were not hooded or closed, but open and seeking. What, he didn't know, but he did know that what ever it was; it kept her awake at night and unnerved her completely.

She sighed and turned to face him fully in the moonlight, thankful that he was fully clothed. She didn't need lust in the forefront of the party her emotions seemed to be having.

"I do not think I am ready for some of the new emotions that have taken purchase in my mind." Her tone was wry, accepting that which she couldn't change, yet not liking it one bit.

"It's been a year since we defeated your father." Robin said, his mind suddenly captured on that one moment in time when she had hugged him, she had done nothing since then. But he still remembered the warmth of her against him and the smell of her hair. "Surely they have sorted themselves out by now?"

"For the most part they have," She paused and continued to look at him curiously, trying to figure out why it was him that her emotions had decided to deign as her first real love. He was attractive enough, this thought had lust leaping forward with her rather descriptive opinion.

She blushed slightly. "But I have found that a few new ones have decided to either appear or come out of the woodwork so to speak."

Robin was not a stupid boy either; he saw her blush, her hesitancy. He felt the rush of emotion she had lost control of briefly, along the link that he didn't fully understand. He DID understand that emotion though and it caused him to blush and then smirk.

He had an answer to a question he had never dared ask, didn't know if he ever would have. He valued their friendship too much to risk anything more, but this; this was more than he had anticipated. He had felt the soft wave of love and the hot shot of lust coming at him like a speeding train.

"Raven, why do these emotions bother you now?" He had to ask, he had to know if it was real. He gave no hint at what he knew, at what he had felt. He wished for his grappling hook desperately, because he felt like he was falling too fast and too far.

"I am not entirely sure, these emotions aren't ones that like to or react well to analyzing." She sighed again; they were so close that he felt her breathe on his cheek. She looked over his shoulder and tried to continue. She knew that he had felt something through that damnable link, but she wasn't sure what.

"You can tell me anything Rae, you know you are safe with me." It wasn't reassurance, but a simple statement of fact, yet it reassured all the same.

"These emotions that have decided to appear and make my life uncomfortable to the point of screaming." She paused from her uncharacteristic frustrated sentence. "These emotions are Lust and Love." She looked him straight in the eye now, wondering what he would say. And wondering why his response was so damned important.

"And?" He asked not really sure what he was supposed to say, he still wanted a secure answer before he poured out his soul. After all no one invites rejection happily.

"And I don't know what to do with them; do I let them run with the rest of them?" Her voice was pleading for answers. "Do I lock them away so I don't feel this way anymore, would that even be possible?"

Robin's breath caught, he couldn't let her shove this away, shove any chance at them away.

"Raven," He hesitated as he took her shoulders, desperately wishing there was a guide to this somewhere in his mind, but that mind that had made him a boy wonder was so unhelpfully blank. "Raven I can't make you keep them or shun them, but you are meant to love, to share that love with someone else, not lock it away."

"They want you Robin." Her voice somehow managed to remain in its monotone until she hit his name, which came out on a breathy sigh that she had never heard before.

"I know Raven," he smiled and touched his forehead to hers, "It's the same for me."

"Yeah." She sighed, "This is going to be a lot of trouble." Her hands reached up to touch his chest and then around his back, as he tucked her head beneath his chin.

"No one ever said it would be easy."

"If they did they were lying." Came her sardonic reply

"Nothing worthwhile is easy."

"Can you be any more cliché?" Her voice was dry as desert sand.

"Sure mmmm." The rest of his sentence was muffled by her hand, he let out a laugh that settled in to the smirk she had grown so fond of.


End file.
